How to get the ball over the overpass!?

[jleibs]

Originally Posted by Swampdude

Well here's what I wanted to do but couldn't because the gigantic flag holder is in the way, although I'd love to see someone try it. Basically, if you could hold the ball at the end of a pole (about 4' long maybe) behind your bot, as you travel towards the bars (finish line), plant the front end of the pole in the carpet with a grippy foot on it, and you pole vault the ball using the bots inertia.
The bot itself is your best source of stored energy which can be transfered into the ball.

So I was thinking about this this morning. Unfortunately I'm unaffiliated with a Team this year so I have nobody to try and convince to look into this

I don't know if this idea is actually that far fetched. Well, at least not the premise of converting bot kinetic energy into actuation.

Simplifying things down, I was mostly thinking about a mechanism which I'll describe in a few steps as follows:

Step 1), Clear out a lot of space in the center of your robot. This definitely involved a very custom chassis.

Step 2) Imagine a pole going through a ring, so that the ring can slide along the pole. Now, mount this ring so that it can rotate in such a way for the pole to do its business. Do so somewhere near the center of your bot.

Step 3) Attach a large, high-friction foot to the end of this pole.

Step 4) Include some kind of actuated latch to keep the pole locked in a position such that the foot is off the ground.

Step 5) Drive forward quickly, then release the latch.

Step 6) Hope that the pole slides down and plants its "foot" on the floor. As the robot continues to drive forward, the pole rotates about the planted foot, being driven by the forward push of the robot at the location of the rotating ring. The rotation and sliding of the ring allow this to happen "nicely."

Step 7) This should be able to generate 30-40 degrees of rotation, at a reasonably high speed with sufficient torque to drive any mechanism you care to implement. The 100 joule figure I've seen for energy that needs to be imparted to the ball really is not that large compared to the kinetic energy of a decent sized robot moving at high speed.

Step 8) Either the other end of this pole flings the ball. Or, what I think would be extra fun: since the ring needs to be able to rotate to accommodate the rotation of the pole, this ring is presumably attached to a shaft. Any number of gears or other mechanisms could be attached to this shaft and used to drive some other mechanism than depends on a large amount of force being delivered over a short period of time.

I hope that wasn't too confusing. Maybe I'll post some drawings this weekend if I have time.

If someone knows of a team doing something like this I would love to hear any success (or terribly tragic failure) stories